A HEALTH minister admitted yesterday that North-East patients were right to protest at being sent 30 miles for a private scan while an NHS machine stood idle.

But Liam Byrne insisted the much-criticised arrangement was only temporary, because a local hospital would soon receive funding to enable it to offer the treatment.

The comments came during a Commons debate staged by Kevan Jones, Labour MP for North Durham, to examine a deal struck by the NHS to "buy in" magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from a private firm.

Under the £90m contract with Alliance Medical to cut long waiting lists, a mobile scanner has been set up at the James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough.

Meanwhile, the MRI scanner at the University Hospital of North Durham is being underused - to the fury of County Durham and Darlington Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

Yesterday, Mr Jones said the deal failed the NHS and claimed it had been struck "not on the basis of evidence, but instead for dogmatic political reasons".

He added: "Thirty miles for some may not seem far. But for many of my constituents, who do not have direct access to a car, it may as well have been on the moon."

Mr Byrne told MPs: "He is right to say that they are forced to go to Middlesbrough when, actually, they should be given the chance to go local, where that is better for them."

He said that, by 2008 or earlier, the Durham hospital would "need to use its scanning capacity to the full" to meet the ambitious target for a maximum waiting time of 18 weeks.

Darlington and Chester-le-Street Primary Care Trust would enjoy a £30m, or 18.5 per cent, increase in funding over the next two years to enable it to do that, he said.

The minister also said every strategic health authority had been asked how many diagnostic scans it needed to buy in, to fill in gaps in capacity.

Mr Jones said afterwards he was disappointed by the minister's response because it had failed to answer most of his questions, including what assessment had been made of the existing health service capacity and the basis of the claim that Alliance Medical scans were half the price of those carried out by the NHS.